A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter F

Flesh and blood

Idiomatic Phrase
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Refers to human beings, especially in the context of family relationships; it emphasizes shared humanity, genetic ties, or the physical, mortal nature of people.

Detailed Definition
Flesh and blood refers to human embodiment, kinship, mortality, and vulnerability. In poetry, the phrase is rich because it joins physical substance with emotional and familial meaning. A person of flesh and blood can be contrasted with stone, spirit, myth, machine, ghost, or idealised beauty. It reminds readers that love, suffering, hunger, ageing, and death occur in bodies. The idiom is especially useful in elegy, devotional poetry, war poetry, and poems that resist abstraction by returning to mortal life.
Example
Example in poetry:
A family poem may call the child flesh and blood, not an abstract duty; In a war elegy, statistics become flesh and blood through one remembered face; The phrase can insist on human reality; A poet might oppose cold law with the claims of flesh and blood.
Additional Notes
Flesh and blood emphasises human reality, kinship, bodily vulnerability, or mortal life. In poetry, it can contrast living bodies with abstractions, statues, ghosts, ideals, or institutions. The phrase is especially useful in family poems, religious poems, war poetry, and dramatic monologue. Students should notice its double force: flesh suggests warmth and desire, while blood suggests ancestry, injury, sacrifice, and shared humanity.
Also Known As
human
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